Division Zero: Thrall

by Matthew S. Cox

  The walls shifted upward in regular flashes of light bands. An unsettling tickle returned to her gut as she gazed at the reflected couple on the silver doors. The blonde sylph hanging off the arm of the handsome billionaire seemed like some helpless debutante incapable of functioning on her own. She bristled at the look on her own face and shifted a half-step right. Konstantin glanced at her adjustment from full-body lean to three-fingered handhold.

  “Are you sure you’re well, dear? You seem to be out of sorts tonight.”

  She found the nausea lessened with her eyes closed. “I feel guilty you’re spending money on me again because the neck was a little tight. This dress is fine, there’s no need to replace it. What you spent on it could feed six families for a week.”

  “Tell you what.” He pulled her into a peck on the cheek. “Tomorrow morning I’ll donate some credits in your name to whatever charity sends food to the disadvantaged.”

  “I’d rather you do that than buy me another dress.”

  The elevator doors opened.

  “Too late, we’re already here.”

  He led her by the hand through an opulent open-air mall corridor. Rose-marble tile floors turned white wherever they reflected the strong overhead lights. A strip of starry night sky was visible past artificial birds through the center of the hall, despite their being seven floors down from the roof. Couples sat in the shade of trees; the food court at the Sector 214 Mallplex was the ‘high end’ of dining for the “well off, but not wealthy” crowd. Somewhere in the distance, a small girl had a fit about the wrong color shoes. Kirsten found the source and offered a sympathetic look at the beleaguered older man weathering the verbal assault from a ten-year-old in an outfit as expensive as what Kirsten wore. He’s got the patience of a saint. Damn, kid, I’d have been happy to have shoes at all at your age.

  Men and women in gleaming white armor, spotless save for a black TMC on their breast, wandered in pairs. The mall security personnel, unlike the last ones she ran into, were in the employ of Triton Manufacturing Corporation rather than the holding company that owned the building. At least eighty percent of the items for sale in this place were made by TMC, a mega-corp that engulfed, over the course of the corporate war, a wide variety of manufacturing and consumer-goods industries.

  The security officers appeared to pay more attention to the workers than the customers. Kirsten thought this odd, pondering it until she realized Konstantin had led her distracted self into a store and a clerk was trying to talk to her. She wasn’t a doll and couldn’t have been older than seventeen. Live workers in the mall? Not dolls? Kirsten squinted a dire look at some of the security staff. Oh, I get it. Watch the poor people working for the elite, make sure they don’t steal.

  “Hi,” she said to the girl, before looking up at Konstantin. “This really isn’t necessary, I―”

  He shushed her with a nod, and took the datapad out of the clerk’s hand and offered it. “Just pick something, don’t worry about it. We’ve got to be there soon.”

  Now she felt guilty about making him late for his big presentation. She grasped the eight-by-eleven inch device bearing images of faceless female bodies in gowns of various sizes, styles, and color. Konstantin had suggested blue, and for whatever reason, it stuck with her. Kirsten handed the pad back to the woman while making an embarrassed face at the wall. The girl took it and turned on her heel. A smile replaced her surly teenage glare as she waved for Kirsten to follow her. She passed a few benches and fake plants and walked into an area full of partitions separated by ivory-colored curtains with faint silvery speckles. Within each chamber, a metal disc about three feet across rose a few inches up from the floor.

  “I’ll need you to take the dress you’re wearing off. Keep your undergarments on though.”

  Mechanically, she reached up and opened the choker, letting the garment slide over her hips to the floor. For a moment, a twinge of shame hit her as she realized she was bare-breasted in a room full of other women about to have their purchases created to size. The sight of Konstantin peeking through the door at her sent a fireball of adrenaline up through her abdomen. Shame shifted to thrill in an instantaneous flash. Having him watch her on display stirred feelings deep within she had never entertained.

  Forgetting at once about the shame of spending such amounts on clothing, she stepped onto the pad and turned to face the clerk. The teen looked away to be polite, noticing the bright red color of Kirsten’s face―though it was not embarrassment anymore.

  “Please lift your arms away from your sides.” The girl poked at a holographic terminal just outside the now-closed curtains. “When it starts spraying, hold your breath.”

  A metal spider descended from above, spinning and whirring about with an array of strange attachments. Green laser light drew glowing lines upon her paleness, shrinking and forming to her contours. Two seconds later, they flickered and went out. Eye-watering chemical fumes surrounded her as the device sprang to life in a flurry. It started at her neck, spraying in passes. Viscous blue muck adhered to her skin, a color change that expanded down over her chest. Kirsten closed her eyes, trying to hold still while being coated in a substance with the consistency and feel of cold cat vomit.

  Breezy chill passed over her ribs, down her back, and onto her thighs. Her arms hovered upward, no longer due to conscious thought. Her face cringed in a grimace appropriate for being dipped in something nasty. Furious robot appendages continued to spin around her, fussing and pulling at the material. More spray on the thighs thickened, pulled into a loose-fitting knee-length skirt as the clicking machine printed the garment onto her body.

  The slime changed texture before her eyes, forming into discrete threads of seven different shades of blue. What had just been liquid became cloth. The garment left her shoulders bare and took on the feel of silk. Two robotic arms pinched it between her shoulder blades, and a rush of cold air hit her. In the span of only a few seconds, the machine slashed the gown to the small of her back and stitched in a nanomesh fastener. A thumbnail sized faux sapphire seated at the upper edge, just on her collarbone, came last. Squeezing it would open or close the back.

  The material fell away from her thighs, no longer sticky, draped as though it had not just come out of a tiny nozzle. Silver dust, hundreds of thousands of spent nanobots from the glop, snowed around her. She gave the metal spider a wary look as it retracted into the ceiling, taking that as a cue to emerge from the private chamber. The clerk was waiting for her, holding a matching silk stole. Kirsten let the girl put it around her shoulders, thanked her, and met Konstantin outside by the front desk. He had the old dress folded over one arm and gave her a broad grin. She squirmed, unable to shake the memory of the dress in liquid form.

  He held his free arm to the side. “Even better than the last.”

  Without thinking it over, she walked right into his waiting caress. “You really shouldn’t have.”

  Konstantin bowed at the clerk before escorted her through the mall. “When I accompany you to a proper store in Milan or Paris and spend thirty thousand on a garment, then you can feel guilty. Think no more of this than you would of a hydroponic coffee.”

  Forty credits is a far cry from six thousand. She fidgeted at the dress. How do they have the nerve to charge that much for something out of a spray nozzle. Kirsten wore a traitor’s mask all the way back to the car, thinking about the people out in the city searching trash containers for their next meal.

  Dull murmuring faded away to the faint clamor of people eating. A serenade of metal utensils upon actual China plates offered a soporific backdrop to distant muted conversations. Konstantin’s table was at the front, amid a patch of shadow cast by the elevated podium. Kirsten knew not one person here; her seat toward the stage-side of the round table gave her a better view of the room than the speaker, who had just spent the past forty minutes droning on about the majority buyout of RedEx by Vostochno-Sibirskaya Kholdingovaya Kompaniya. VSKK, as it soon became shortened to, was one o
f the few corporate entities of the ACC permitted to trade within the UCF.

  Centered in the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky Federal District, which managed a precarious balance of continued membership in the ACC while adopting a style of “citizen-management” compatible with the views of the west, the VSKK had not set off too many red flags. Most of the “Berlin-Moscow Crowd”, as Konstantin called them, had no interest in trading with the UCF―they wanted to own it. Kirsten suffered through a rather boring diatribe about how the “idiots in Moscow” think old-world government is dead, and capitalism is the true destiny of man.

  “Not that it matters much what the Senate thinks,” said a pale, skeletal-thin older man with wild, puffy white hair and a sheer powder-blue suit. His tone carried an air of puffed up superiority that rankled Kirsten at hearing it. From the waist up, he seemed thin, but his ass had to weigh two hundred pounds alone. “RedEx is legally headquartered on Mars, and no matter what people on either side say, Mars will get its sovereignty sooner or later.” He pointed a fork with a nugget of ham on it at Konstantin. “You think I jest,” he said, before snatching the ham in his teeth. “but thmf”―he chewed until he could speak again― “the MLF is only gaining support. And RedEx hasn’t paid a single credit in taxes in two years.”

  “It’s true,” added his wife, the only kindred soul in the room. Like Kirsten, she seemed miserable here. “They’ve been challenging the legitimacy of the UCF to collect taxes on Martian soil. Even if their claim is baseless, it’s kept them tangled in litigation for twenty-four months.”

  A younger man hastily swallowed some frightening white blob-like mass. “They know they’re going to lose, but by the time the judiciary hands down a verdict, they will cry bankruptcy with all their assets in shadow accounts.” Kirsten left the blob sitting on her plate untouched, the only one at the table to do so. She couldn’t even watch him eat it. He gestured with his fork. “They’d be stupid not to, and there’s nothing the tax bureau will be able to do about it.”

  Two glasses of wine, a mostly full belly, and scintillating conversation about corporate tax law allowed her one final glance at the nattering rich that packed the room around her before she faded out. Blackness came underlined with random voices calling about the filet being a hair too cold or too overcooked. One woman’s wine wasn’t dry enough. Another whined endlessly about how her domestics steal small objects out of spite.

  A sense of vertigo overtook her. Her fall out of the chair landed in a muck-filled tunnel. Coarse cloth scratched at her skin as she pushed herself into a seated position. Bare toes squished through ink-black ooze, and her steps went ankle deep in whatever coated the metal ground. Twelve-year-old Kirsten yawned and stretched before clasping her hands to her growling stomach. Her dress was a large square of canvas with a hole in the middle for her head; a belt made of an old electric cord held it around her waist. Exposed ribs on both sides acted as a continuous reminder of how cold it was in the Beneath.

  It was time to make the long climb through pipes to the surface world while she still could. In another year or two, she would be too big to fit and have to find a way get the hatches open―or be stuck down here like everyone else. She stretched before creeping out of the shaft that led from the hollow where she had created a nest of old pillows, cloth scraps, and whatever toys had been left behind down below. She slept in the lower reach of the city plate, high above the Earth. The ground had more room, and less slime, but it was also dangerous. Up here, through a gap too small for an adult to fit, she found a safe place to lay her head down.

  No longer noticing the way her feet squished on the metal floor, or even how bad it smelled, she thought about the fragrance of the giant trash boxes in the outside world and got hungry as she walked to the nearest ladder. The pipe she needed to climb through was some distance away, in a place where loud machines rattled all hours of the day and everything stank. She would have made her lair closer, if not for the noise and the reek. No one, not even the dead friends who kept an eye on her, could sleep there.

  She climbed down the ladder, noticing a dingy man in overalls and a red cap grinning at her as her toes touched old pavement. At the time, she had thought him friendly; in this dream, Kirsten’s adult mind knew why he was smiling. She knew what he was staring at while she descended. Crude canvas ponchos tied with wire hid little from an observer below.

  Her memory of what he said blurred into tonal noises and slow motion gestures. He offered food, but she had to pay for it. The man seemed nice. He kept smiling, waving cans at her with pictures of stuff that looked edible. She nodded in the dream. Her voice came as a high-pitched murmur, words lost to the fog of time.

  Yes, she wanted food.

  Sure, she could do him a favor.

  Her arm entered her field of view, holding his hand as she walked with him. A few blocks away, past warped and broken houses, a little brown door led to a room with a grungy mattress, a table, and a few chairs. Kirsten was innocent, but not stupid. Even without skimming his surface thoughts, which she did, she knew what he wanted. She knew what the favor was. She glanced down at her toes, and tried looking up with her best pleading, begging stare. Perhaps guilt would overtake lust.

  Blurry blue flannel covered the arms of the indistinct figure standing there, gesturing at the door. The first clear words she recalled were, “Your choice, kid. I ain’t about to force nothin’.” He tapped two octagonal cans together, each about the size of his palm. Both bore markings: UCFM-PSK. He backed away and took a seat in a folding chair, leaving an unblocked path to the door. “Military ‘personal sustenance kit.’ They’re fresh, better’n anything you’ll find down here. No mold, no rat shit, hell… even heats itself up. It’s here if you want it. I got water―clean water―not that black gunk.”

  Hunger was overwhelming. How bad could it be? People do it for fun all the time. Mother was up there. Every time she crawled to the surface, Mother might be waiting. This man did not seem like he would hurt her. She trusted him more than Mother. She wasn’t little anymore; food not from garbage seemed like a lost treasure.

  Her hands moved without thought. The wire-belt fell across the tops of her feet, letting the improvised garment flutter loose. She sat on the cold, damp mattress, staring one last time at the door. The growl in her stomach grew louder as she scratched at her gut. Now, she could not make eye contact with him. Why am I ashamed? She clung to the rough cloth, shivering from fear as well as cold. She wished she had more practice begging, maybe she could have guilted him into feeding her instead. The boy had tried to get her to go begging with him on the surface. He wasn’t afraid of people like she was.

  He also never came back. She hadn’t seen him in two weeks.

  “Okay,” she said, “but, can I please eat one first? Just in case…”

  “Osure.” One of the cases plopped onto the mattress next to her. “You thinkin’ I might kick ya out afterward ‘n welch. Well, I ain’t the mean type, and I trust ya, girl. You don’t look like the stealin’ type. We got a deal?” He moved to sit next to her on the bed, arm around her back.

  She jumped at the touch, fearing the kind of hand Mother would lay upon her. His was different, warm, comforting. The man’s voice fell away to the warble of indistinct remembrance as he said comforting things and kept petting her hair like a cat. Kirsten stared at the metal octagon in her hands, salivating at the promise of untainted food. She listened to his thoughts; he would not harm her―she was precious.

  The crack of the lid, yielding to a grimy little finger, startled her awake amid the remembered hiss of the chemical warming agent and the smell of beef stew.

  Kirsten shot upright in her seat, bringing a startled end to some discussion about an investment opportunity on Venus. The taste of military field rations bubbled in the back of her throat; almost to the point of bringing her fifteen-hundred-credit dinner up. At the time, the mystery meat had been as if her mother’s invented God had come down from his ivory tower in person and bestowed such a
feast upon her. If only she had not had to pay for it in blood.

  As the faceless man said, it was her choice. She could have walked away; she could have scrounged for scraps, but she wanted filet mignon.

  She wanted Konstantin.

  A rising tide of shame set her eyes in search of the nearest bathroom. She had to get away from these people. She was not one of them. Inside, she still felt like a dirt-covered orphan that snuck into a room full of rich people. The sight of her plate struck her as shameful. There were others out there, still living as she once did. Every minute spent among such arrogance and greed reminded her of where someone like her belonged.

  Konstantin’s hand found her shoulder. The minute she looked into his red-brown eyes, she forgot all about her past. Self-loathing and contempt for the wealthy vanished, leaving her biting her lower lip like a schoolgirl. He leaned in close, planting a polite kiss on the cheek by her left ear. Kirsten shivered with excitement and flashed a wicked smile as she fantasized about what Konstantin would do to the man who made her trade herself for food.

  “I am sorry for bringing you to such a droll event. If I were able to, I would happily have spared you such an evening. Alas, I could not extricate myself.”

  “Oh.” She put one hand over her heart. “I’m sorry for falling asleep. At least I woke up before I fell out of the chair. That would’ve been mortifying.”

  He kissed the back of her hand and stood amid the sound of his name reverberating through the dinner hall of the Imperial Hotel.